Whether she work on land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
As yet no attempt has been made to show the utility of this promiscuous and multitudinous crowd of beauties—and it seems not likely that such an attempt can yet be made with success: and the phenomena of Nature are therefore likely for a long time to come to impress most men with the sense of beauty for beauty's sake. But in respect of certain particular and separable instances, the attempt has recently been made to show that the beauty exhibited is useful to the structure exhibiting it, and consequently that it may be accounted for by the strictly utilitarian principle of the survival of the fittest,—one instance in which this has been most notably attempted being in respect of the beauty of flowers. Let us consider how far beauty can thus be accounted for in this particular case.
There will be a great advantage in this course; for beauty is a thing about which it is not very easy to argue: it is too subtle, too evanescent, too disputable, to afford an easy material for the logical or scientific crucible; and these difficulties we shall best surmount by in the first place isolating certain beautiful things for our consideration, and limiting to them our inquiry into how far each of the rival theories is sufficient to explain their existence. We shall thus try to narrow the great controversy to very definite and distinct issues.
"Flowers," says Mr. Darwin,[3] "rank amongst the most beautiful productions of Nature, and they have become, through natural selection, beautiful, or rather conspicuous in contrast with the greenness of the leaves, that they might be easily observed and visited by insects, so that their fertilization might be favoured. I have come to this conclusion, from finding it an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilized by the wind it never has a gaily-coloured corolla. Again, several plants habitually produce two kinds of flowers: one kind open and coloured, so as to attract insects; the other closed and not coloured, destitute of nectar, and never visited by insects. We may safely conclude that, if insects had never existed on the face of the earth, the vegetation would not have been decked with beautiful flowers, but would have produced only such poor flowers as are now borne by our firs, oaks, nut and ash trees, by the grasses, by spinach, docks, and nettles."